It’s not actually a board game – it’s a card game. You build a deck up and draw cards from it each turn – no pieces to move around. The deck is built during play and you get to chose what cards to add, meaning that in true German board game style, luck is minimised. It’s sort of hard to explain and while the rules seem to me to assume quite a lot, if you jsut take those assumptions and run with them, it’s a pretty simple but eyt tactically deep game with lots of options.

The reason I picked up this (as opposed to one of the other games I want such as Chaos in the Old World, Arkham Horror or Agricola) is because it’s playable with 2 players, not too complex and relatively short, all of which makes it perfect for playing with Abbie. And play she did – utterly destroying me in our first game last night.

I reckon this one will get a lot of play – we just used the recommended basic set up, but the core set includes 25 sets of ‘Kingdom’ cards and each game only uses 10 of those. There’s lots of different combinations here and each should have a few little tricks to learn. Then there’s now two expansion sets as well!

I’d recommend Dominion really highly based on our one session, and I’m really looking forward to playing with a larger group at some point.

• Holy crap – Planescape: Torment is getting a re-release! Best CRPG EVER. This will work properly on Vista and Windows 7 apparently so it will work nicely for the new PC… (thanks to the Wertzone – no idea how I missed this on my RPS feed)
• Boing Boing has a piece on using Google Wave as a chat channel for RPGs. I guess, but it won’t replace the table top for me.
• Boardgame News has a great article running down card games and boardgames that have been released using the whole Cthulhu/Lovecraft mythos – great, good, average and bad. I really want to play some Arkham Horror.
• And finally, here’s a report about the Essen Game Fair by a guy from local shop Paradigm Infinitum.

Power Grid is a 2-6 player board game in which you play power companies competing to control the largest number of towns. To me this seems like a pretty weird idea for a board game, but it’s pretty good fun. Like most German board games you don’t confront the other players directy – the competition is over resources and the like. This leads to a nice social experience, but it’s also pretty complex so the conversation tends to be focused on the game.

The complexity, and the fun, come from a series of different rules mechanics. First of all, you buy power stations. For there’s a variety of different stations, using different fuel sources – coal, oil, garbage, uranium and wind. There’s also a variety of different levels of efficiency – some need two of coal to power one town, others can power five towns with the same amount. I won;t go into it here, but there’s also mechanisms to make sure that power plants are put into play in a fairly progressive way – you can’t buy a massive fusion plant in round one and you can’t buy a tiny coal plant in round 10.

To get power stations you have to bid against other players, but there’s only four plants available at any time. You can see what the next four likely power plants to come on the market are as well and this means that you can be strategic about what plants you want, while also trying to bid up other players.

Once you’ve bought a plant, you buy the resources to stock it. Again, this is more complex than it seams because the more of a resource that’s bought in a turn, the more expensive it becomes. Then you have to buy access to different towns. Since the aim of the game is to power the most towns possible, its important not to spend all your cash on plants and resources to power them with.

The variety of different subsystems keeps you on your toes and gives Power Grid a nice depth, but it also makes the game a little unfriendly to new comers and casuals. It’s definitely a geek game, unliek something like Settlers of Catan which you could teach your grandma in a single sitting. As a result, we decided we’d play again next week – it’s the sort of thing that will reward numerous sittings I think.

One’s a throw away comment by designer Ken Hite in a  con review:

boardgaming boomed this weekend as it seems to be doing all over.

And the other is a longer, more considered piece by Steve Darlington, known for his work on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay line, amongst other things:

In short, for what people want out of an RPG – to move through something like a plot, to have a character of their own design, to make meaningful choices about goals and combat, to roll dice and produce random events, to make choices IN character even if they work against what might be best for winning the game…all of these are being met, more and more, in board games.

(as a side note, Steve’s a fan of this blog)

I’m not sure about this myself, but my experience of boardgames is that they are too directed in their story – one of my signle favourite RPG-things is that the GM can’t predict what the hell the players will do. I don’t miss the box set games of the past – big maps annoy me and I don’t need more crap in my life, just good ideas.

Do any of you feel that there’s an increasing convergence between RPGs and board games?

But I thought it would be nice to have some new year resolutions that I actually do want to achieve so here they are:

RPGs

1. Play in a regular campaign, work allowing. This should happen as I’m supposed to play in my friend Dan’s ‘Mythic Japan’ game, using the World of Darkness rules.

2. Run/Play at least one of the following games that are on my shelf but have never been opened in anger:

• D&D Rules Cyclopedia
• GURPS 4e (preferably using the complete collection of Transhuman Space books I have)
• Dark Heresy – the Warhammer 40k RPG.
• Angel – I had a great idea for a game set in Hong Kong in the lead up to the handover. Hong Kong is a city I know fairly well, having lived there as a kid and having visited at least once a year for the last three years as well, but no one I’m likely to play with really knows it at all.

3. Work on the campaign world I’ve got kicking around in my head – a grim, dark fantasy world with lots of malevolent faeries.

Video Games -

1. Finish at least three of the following:

• Grand Theft Auto 4 – I’m on the last bloody mission and can’t manage to finish it. Bah!
• Rainbow 6: Vegas – similarly, I’ve got one level to go. I refuse to buy the next one until I’ve finished this.
• Call of Duty 4 – I’m roughly half way through, and being annoyed by a sneaky level.
• Bioshock & Mass Effect - barely started these, but I was enjoying them both and with the sequels due either this year or next, I’d better get onto them!
• Fable II – again, barely started, but it’s a loaner so better get on with it!

As there’s nothing I’m actually looking forward to coming out on the 360 any time soon, I hope this resolution isn’t too hard.

2. Play online more – I have a Xbox Live Gold account which I’ve used next to never (OliveTheMage is anyone is looking to play). Currently it’s a waste of $100 a year so I’d like to either use it or drop it entirely.

Books

1. Read a bit more!

2. Read more of the Fantasy/Sci-fi classics that Gollancz publish. I’ve been working my way through some good stuff in 2008 – finally read Elric and some Gene Wolfe for example – but I’d like to make a concerted effort to read some of the origins of these genres.

3. Review. One thing I’ve like to do on here is review some of these books. These won’t be major reviews, but hopefully they’d be a good way of organising some thoughts on the books I read and perhaps even generate soem discussion.

Board Games

Once my friend Duncan gets back to Melbourne, I’d like to do at least one serious, all day, board gaming session. Perhaps a return to Axis and Allies?

So there you have it. Check back in 12 months and I’ll go through what I achieved!

Thanks Soph.

As I became a father for the second time only a few months ago, my ability to keep up with table-top RPGs has been pretty limited. But I still come across interesting things from time to time and I’m going to be playing a new game in the New Year, so I’m intending to post occasionally on matters relating to all kinds of geek subjects – comics, books, and games of all sorts: board, electronic and table-top.

As an introduction, I thought I’d do a slight best of. It’s not actually a best of, as I haven’t played enough of anything to really judge, but it’s probably the things I’ve enjoyed most in 2008 across a number of categories.

Console Game

Grand Theft Auto IV is without a doubt one of the most interesting stories ever seen in a game, along with one of the most well-realised worlds. I’d only ever played San Andreas previously, and enjoyed it immensely, but this blew it out of the water. I came to generally care about many of the bit players, and those I didn’t care about I genuinely anticipated their arrival and eventual departures. There were some mild irritations (mostly the girlfriends) but over all I thought it was simply amazing.

PC games

Mount & Blade is the only PC game I actually played much of this year – it’s an indie game out of Turkey that’s been playable in demo form for a couple of years. Basically you take the role of an adventurer who rides out in search of glory in a large ‘secondary-world‘ land mass that strangely reflects a version of early medieval Europe. And once there you do a whole lot of fighting, mostly on horse back. It’s weirdly addictive fun, charging down rows of Nord axe men with your lance couched for maximum damage and it’s led to me staying up regularly longer than I should have when I know I’ll be woken another 2 times that night. Apparently the mod scene is robust and where the game really comes into it’s own but I haven’t done much of that yet.

Board Game

The only new board game I played this year was Agricola while on a trip to London, but it’s a goody. Players manage peasant family farms in the Middle Ages and must try to bring them out of poverty and subsistence. Extremely simple in basic play, but with huge tactical depth, it was massively well reviewed, the toast of GenCon (without actually being there) and extremely German.

Comics

I don’t read many comics these days, but I did read a number of the new Dark Horse Conan comics by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Cary Nord. These aren’t a 2008 release as such, but they bring the old barbarian to life through a mixture of adaptations of Howard’s works and original stories to fill in the gaps. The first four trades are fantastic (including a wonderful few issues by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola in the 4th) and the Conan: Born on the Battle Field prequel collection entirely conceived by Busiek is perhaps the best of them. But the 5th trade is where Timothy Truman takes over as writer and it’s just not up to scratch. I haven’t bought the recently released 6th trade but the reviews have been ho-hum so I may not bother…

So there you have it – just a few musings on things I enjoyed in 2008.